The waves were strong today, crashing tall against the isle’s cliffs before sucking back out to sea. But Billy’s dinghy sailed true, riding waves and skirting rocks as he approached the crack in the cliffside. Today was the day, there was no mistaking it. Turning sharp to avoid a rock, Billy surveyed the island.

He was close enough. Jumping off the bow of his boat, he swam to the cliffside, clung to a rock, surveyed his approach. His wife hadn’t wanted him to go today. His son - he was so young; how could he understand? If there were just a little more time -

Enough. Up onto the rock face, sideways into the crack.

Beyond the crack, a cavern, wide open. Salt stalactites hung pendant from the ceiling, dripping water, reflecting cerulean light from the pool further down the pass. And then came the skeletons with arms raised high, each salt-encrusted bone doing its part to support the world above.

Here was Billy’s father, small pieces of meat still stuck to his ribs, his spine. Here his grandfather. Generations of patriarchs lined the passage, each having obeyed the call in turn. It was the family business - when the island called, you went.

He was at the pool now.

His wife hadn’t wanted him to go today; his kids - would his son know to follow, know how to hear when it was time? If he could have just another year, another month to spend with them -

Enough. The island was calling.

Drinking deep from the pool, he felt the salt in the water begin to stick to his bones, took one last look towards the sunlight.

Arms raised and among his fathers, Billy surrendered himself, became one of the bones of the island.

Love, cherishment, flowers, kisses, wine, and the years went by. Every anniversary, we played our wedding video. On the screen, our promises repeated. The lady in my arms and the lady on the screen would look at me and say again, "I do."

I said all the right things, I made all the right moves. Her eyes still sparkled with laughter, her hair still shone in the sun, but I found myself looking away. I grew used to her charms, and my heart stirred less over time. I gave her more of everything. Flowers, kisses, wine, time, giving my heart every chance to be filled. She was still mine, body, heart, and soul, but it mattered less and less.

She filled the jar with flower petals and shiny stones and sprayed it with her mother's perfume. Lilies! the scent screamed. She left it out on the windowsill to catch sunlight, and out again at night to catch the stars. When her little brother laughed, she placed the jar near him to capture the sound, and when he cried, she hid the jar under blankets and pillows so it wouldn't take the noise.

People loved the good magic. Her parents beamed, her brother giggled, and people at church smiled when she passed, calling her a lovely little girl.

But some days, the magic ran out. She'd reach her hand into the jar and find her fingertips pressed against the cold, empty glass at the bottom. Those days, if she didn't find out in time, she'd be left to face the world with her own bad magic.

People would frown at her without knowing why. Biting insects would follow her, buzzing in her ears and stinging people around her. Her brother would be cranky, her parents would fight, and the sky would be cloudy and over-bright-- an ugly, gray light that hurt her eyes, forcing her to face the ground and watch her feet step between the cracks on the pavement.

Those days, those hollow and cold days that filled her mind with static and left her skin cracking and flaking like old paint, Tara sits by the stairs with her empty jar, hoping that some piece of good magic will fall inside so she could hide the bad magic again.

Agonized contortions played across the cherubic face of young Joseph Amaral as he was visited once again by his succubus Mary. He had never been sure if he enjoyed her visits and when he awoke each morning, often mid-orgasm, it was with a haunting sense of confusion that shadowed him all day.

This time he had been walking through a forest in which ever larger and more phallic mushrooms sprouted before him wherever he looked. He stopped to rub the tapered tip of one of them. Embarrassed and wishing not to be seen he glanced over his shoulder to discover that while he wasn't looking his mind had installed a window behind him. A young Jewish girl was looking in. How long had she been there?

Since it was no use for either to continue pretending to the other the girl, who now more obviously bore a resemblance to the Virgin Mary, reached around the side of the window frame, lifted the stay, pushed the window wide open, and climbed through it one leg at a time. Joseph's mind then conjured a chair. Joseph knew what he must do. Reluctantly he placed the girl on the chair and began to vigorously rape her.

The girl was very convincing. She knew just how wide to stretch her lips and eyelids, how impotently to kick at him while he used her cunt to

'Joseph! Joseph!'

bring himself pantingly to the inexorable orgasm as his mother woke him up with immaculate timing. That morning budding little Joseph Amaral had become God the Father.

It was sometime after the house party when you sat down next to me on the couch, laid your head on my shoulder, and asked "You don't mind, do you?" It was still after then when you smiled coyly, and answered yourself "No, I see the permission in your eyes." Yet it was before that weekend we woke up sharing a bed. It was months after the dinner where you said "How does your lips taste?" before brightly blushing... yet definitely before I asked if you wanted your own key.

Sometime during the ten months you were in my life I came to learn I loved you. Now that you're gone, I feel like you've taken with you a part of me.

Ethanol rich bite, silver light shining through bottles, what did it ever get him? The pace, the time, some chords, some strings, it all stopped. The photograph he denies. There it is still: a Polaroid converted to digital of an empty room, the bass guitar, the guitar, the drums, the cello, all left on the floor, unplugged, cords spiraling in black and white dead amps, and nobody in the shot. Just an empty room with abandoned instruments.

And that was the way it is. It is prophecy, it is how time was meant to be.

So he drinks the pure stuff, and the memories become fuzzy. They dim into twinkling silver light, shining through an unmarked bottle he found in his mother’s basement.

The room below is a laboratory, rare glass vessels, astrolabes, and the stench of death from bodies, so many bodies, the freshest half-dissected on a table in a chalk circle at the centre of the chamber.

Emaciated, desiccated arms poke from grey robes, grip a gnarled staff, and with pained, aching movements, the resident rises, pulls himself to a stooping stance. He peers at the Crownless Traveller, glowing eyes from within a hood, tattered by unlifetimes.

"HUMAN" he rasps.

The Crownless Traveller approaches with the cautious footwork of a warrior, stares unblinkingly, brings his face closer until his nose filled with the putrefied stink of the necromancer's breath.

"HUMANS NO LONGER COME. WHY HAVE YOU COME?"

In rehearsed motion, the Crownless Traveller presents his answer, holds forth a longsword in a black leather scabbard, raises it between them. With cautious, steady movements, he holds the scabbard in his right hand, his eyes never wavering from those glowing pits, and with his left, he clasps the hilt, draws the sword, allows barely an inch of blade to show.

Within the blade shimmers everycolour, and countless long-dead voices cry with the hopes and fears of countless long-dead worlds. Only when he can bear the screams no longer does he plunge the sword deep within the scabbard once more, pushing with finality.

It was a low day and I went down to look for stuff. It’s supposed to be illegal. Before, you couldn’t afford to live within fifty miles of here. Not long after, we moved right in. The others were all fighting over the huge houses so I had my pick of safer places. They probably all washed out in their sleep last week.

A new beach is soft, you want to test the ground with a stick. The stick helps you find stuff, too. It hasn’t been this low in weeks. You could even see the top of the old fence.

On my way back up I saw a beach patrol for the first time. Looking up at him I saw there was a new fence, way above my house, even. He was staying within about twenty feet of it, looking mostly uphill, not down.

But he looked right at me. I was scared at first, but he sort of sized me up and kept moving.

A beach is a place for washing things away, grinding things up. Of course. You patrol it to protect things from the beach, things you care about, not to protect the beach or anything on it. So the beach isn’t where the sand meets water but the edge of the real land, wherever they decide that is.

It was a weird thing to understand. I sat right down and sank in a few inches. I lay all the way back.

Out by the horizon a huge roof came into view. It was so far away, but I could feel the slurry sand sucking out under me. The wave rose up, miles out, like a wall in front of the horizon. Time to get off the beach. Probably the last low day in a while.

Every Wednesday night, I am here. Except that one time I was sick. Even when I work until 8 in the evening and have a class in the morning at 7:30 AM, I come here. They told me about it in my first week on the job, and I've come here as a matter of routine because I need a lifeline. I am a stranger in a strange land, sleeping on a couch, rolled up in a curtain, breaking things constantly, and fearing that everything I do is terribly wrong. So this is where I go, where everyone knows my name, more or less, and where I can feel that warm glow of confusion. I have a strict financial and temporal allocation for the amount of fun I can have. Although I account my money here different than the other money I spend, and try not to think about it too much. A half liter of beer is eighteen eggs, and a plate of french fries is two week's worth of cheese. I don't think about it, because living the good life is expected from the expatriates, and the good life is the buzz and hugs and gently fading focal length of intoxication. And so I am here every week, meeting interesting people, enjoying the feeling of dancing along the edge of drunkenness, and wondering what opportunities are apart to open up. South America is romantic, right? I look at my beer at the 60% mark. Maybe when it reaches the 40% mark, my feelings will come free and everything will fall into place. Don't think about what I will feel like waking up tomorrow. It will fall into place. After all, I am still having fun, because I am obligated to.

I don't think about the fear of sobering up, the fear of walking home, the fear of my keys fumbling in the lock. Just enjoy it. Wait for the opportunity. And I did. I am still having fun.

A bro is worse than a maiden aunt when he is asking you why you don't have a girlfriend. It's a bit smarmy, hearing about how obvious and easy it is to pick up girls. But its a good question: why don't I? Hey, I put on the right show, I am here, still having fun, and yet after a year of doing my duty as a digital nomad or whatever, no one I see out and about seems to be able to schedule any time for anything else. Have I ever had a conversation with these people sober? How can I tell a woman that I am not playing 11th dimensional chess to seduce her, but just desperately want to speak with someone in our native language, because I am lost and alone? How do people who make around 100 dollars a week casually spend 20 dollars on basic beer and bar appetizers? Why do these problems never seem to happen to any of the other hashtagged international set? Why the fuck am I paying more than 5 dollars for a Stella Artois?

I am not still having fun. I start to become derelict in my duty to be having constant fun. People ask me why. People tell me they miss me. I live ten, twenty minutes from these people. We have the magic of social media at our fingertips. HMU, as the kids say. I am no longer still having fun. The pressure is off. I have never felt better.

Lightly sprinkle with even distribution the Finite amount of non-renewable resources onto the ecosystem.
Empty cups of water with tenderness into available dimples and furrows in the ecosystem.
Carefully place ecosystem within fragile greenhouse with your loving heart and cold washed hands.
Throw Manual away without consulting.
Pick randomly from Stupidity index cards to establish: thrust of dumping bucket of humanity onto above and force of stirring above within cauldron.

The man bent over a disheveled desk, his back aching, his eyes bleary, his hands putting the finishing touches on an expensive cuckoo clock.

Kids these days...watching too many bad movies. Abduction during the night, black sack over his head, 2 hour, 12 minute, 38 second ride...designed to disorient. As if he hadn't been through worse in his life...

Laughing inwardly, if there was one thing he was perfect at, it was measuring time. A thickly sliced rye bread and cheese sandwich sat uneaten near his right elbow. His dead wife made a disparaging remark about the lack of a proper plate as well as the overall state of his appearance.

He nodded in agreement as he recalled other places, other jobs, other demanding clients. He had done it for the money and for that he was ashamed. The money was supposed to save her but Fate had other plans.

Not this time, Miriam, not this time. He placed a miniature camera in the cuckoo's mouth.

"Come on, old man. You haven't got all day", followed by the rude jab of a gun to the back of his wrinkled neck.

Fleeting smile as the old man imagined the death and destruction that would not occur this night, the faces of those responsible for past atrocities captured clearly in 60 FPS as the repaired cuckoo called out the eighth hour while he and his grandchildren celebrated Purim far away.

Rubbing his arthritic fingers, he asked for yellow mustard for the sandwich. His dead wife laughed, knowing exactly how he would squiggle the mustard over the cheese.

Inching up icy steps, the girl held the cups carefully. Wisps of snow curled through the rampart overhead. The sole figure above the iron gate, wrapped in fur and helmet capped, was a prop. His spear and horns, daunting at a distance, only draped a slumped figure.

Still, even greybeards need to break their fast. She set her mulled wine down, then nudged him.

She wrinkled her nose and sighed. Ten years on now, the old man still used his sing-song city-speech. She could still remember her first visit, her father's offer to have her guide him through town. She could still smell his breath of fetid fish and olives, his strange gesturing, his blankets for clothes.

She tried to keep him being played for a fool at market, to keep laughter quiet when he asked for ink. Over the years, she just tried to keep him safe and sane. Someday, his great city could forgive. Her reward might be as great.

He shuddered, whether at her question or the frigid air, she could not tell. The road winding away from the town gate to the plain below was covered in rolling snow drifts. Along the frozen shoreline, beneath walls' shadow, rows of overturned boats caked in ice.

Currents of time and place and memory bring them, in spirals of decreasing radius. Some are washed through the portals on the waves of life, and others on the waves of death. Around them all, around and above us, the City roars. Its voice is the plangent iron beehive scream of millions of lives and millions of deaths; of hours and days and weeks and seconds and moments and Planck time eyeblinks.

Around the boroughs, opening to the sun; subways and sewers and stormdrains and manholes and tunnels and prosaic doorways in walls and hatches and gratings. They offer pathway and mystery, enticing the lost, seducing the content, deceiving the unwary. From the edges, from the surfaces, from the spaces, people are swept in by fate and worry and need and love and want and lust and debt.

The portals lead to paths, lead to tunnels, lead to caverns, lead to voids, lead to the sound and the light.

In the center, far down, around so very many turns, hidden from view, the furnace waits.

"Wow! Crazy for a while, but better now. Everything, ... familiar, yet new and strange."

"Normal. The cruft built up over your life about things and people and what they mean to you is gone. Last step: limbic system replacement. Prepare for wild random swings between fear, ecstasy, mania, and depression."

...

"Fucking hell! Please, never again! But , ... now, ... much more relaxed! Less suspicious and fearful. Am I still me? Why was I so angry? Feels like I shed a heavy, filthy old coat. If I was born this way, ... those terrible, terrible things I did, ... I wouldn't have. Couldn't have."

WHAM!

The doors of the surgical suite explode open and a coterie surges in, led by a surly man. Beside him, a woman holds a sledge hammer like a weapon at the ready. The confused, terrified patient writhes against her restraints in terror. With a tense mixture of disgust and heartbreak, the man speaks in loud authority: "This THING! It looks and speaks like our sister-in-arms and my true beloved. IT'S NOT! It's an inhuman residue, stripped of its soul by an evil machine, made into a mockery of God's greatest miracle! Kill it now!"

A swift swing, a great splatter of blood and tissue, and a hammer left buried in a skull broken, effusing gore.

"Autotune?? What would my old fans think?! Plus - I still got that ace!" Young MC looks distressed.

"Autotune, or crunk - whatever", his manager replies: "But stop making oldschool tracks about getting detention and passing notes in classrooms. You're how 'young' by now?! People think you're a has-been, or a pedo--- hell, I'm not sure what's worse anymore! And you keep talking about some ace in the hole. No whiff of that!"

A rough knock on the door. Without response, Suge bursts in and moves toward Young, knocking several carefully placed action figures off the table. Young gets up, wide-eyed, his mouth open. Suge points his Glock at him: "However the hell a motherfucker like you got 'em in the first place - and I give fuck about that story - hand me the tapes! Now."

Young sighs: "Ok, let's make it short - Ninja Turtles are on. You think I got those tapes with unreleased Pac rhymes? I ain't got those..." Slowly, Young assembles back his action figures: "But I got ones that sound like Pac. Like, a lot. Like, you kinda... fell for it?"

Suge's arm sinks, putting away his Glock. He gives Young a little jab: "Ok, fooled me. That's between us. But now I'm foolin' people. You get fifteen percent. This is our retirement fund."

He drinks from the cup, tentatively at first but then gulping with intent. The metal clatters across the ground. The tablelegs grow fur. The reliefs on the wall fade into nothing; faces of fear and resolve become curiosity and awe before draining to islands, to edges, to points. Everything crackles but the drapes: they are singing. Impossible lightbeams nudging sinuous purple and black. The table is hiding in the corner, shaking. A grain of salt falls from its edge to the floor. When it lands the floor erupts in green flame, a goose flying at ten meters per second into his eardrums. Feathers come to rest on the window sill. The drapes are blowing but the feathers do not move. The floorboards are buckling, their nails' complaints resonating until they pop from their hundred year homes. The table is kneeling. The flames are so bright that the expressions come back into the walls, the paper twirling flowers in their hair, eyebrows crooked, pupils searching. He vomits and the vines are reaching up from the chair to tickle his arms, he must force himself to breathe because his brainstem is too busy dancing with the fairies on the flametongue edges. And the wallmen have gone to dance among the trees, shouting with leaves in their hair and slapping their thighs, and pointing to the fire and throwing their heads back. The crickets are all in a line, a great circle of chitinous magick, marching up from the earth and back down into it. And the moon breaks through the sky, and the sound of it is more than there are hairs on the back of his neck, as he reaches up toward his face.

We'll never find you, not with our minds gone like this, not in this darkness. It feels as though I've chased you through dimensions now, across the universe. I wish I could say that I feel I am closer but no matter how far we make it you slip further away. This galaxy swirls madly around us and every time I reach for your hand it disappears, the ghostly whisps of almost sucking the air out of my lungs.

Still, there is nothing else to hollow me out this way and I would hate to feel so much again. We take what is left of you and keep walking through the stellar shrapnel of all our firsts, through the winds and debris, carving out our trail of blood and love and silence. You left us both long ago, crawled so deep inside we will never get you out. I will always wish you were here, devouring the stars with your ravenous eyes, spilling your light across the earth.

I wake up, again, and we are still alone. This strange ghost of you stares vacantly straight through the hole in my chest.